The Plandemic

I don’t hold any major conspiratorial views on the Covid pandemic. In fact, I believe that our elites (including in politics, public health, finance, etc) did a better than expected job with regard to Covid, even though they made mistakes.
I have zero patience with Plandemic conspiracies, but I recognize that people who hold these beliefs may well be great people who are successful in business and in life and they just hold some theories I regard as not credible. Hugo Mercier explains why we did not evolve to be gullible with regard to our vital interests, but with regard to stories that have no bearing on our daily responsibilities, we can often afford to do as we want.
The conventional wisdom is that a believer in the Plandemic suffers from motivated reasoning, cognitive laziness, or epistemic corruption by bad media. I don’t think these frames are necessary. Mercier distinguishes intuitive beliefs, which carry behavioral consequences and therefore get filtered rigorously, from reflective beliefs, which sit in a kind of cognitive holding pen. Reflective beliefs can be entertained, repeated, even defended without being connected to action. A Seventh-day Adventist who believes that we live in end times is just as likely to do his job as the next guy. At work, he effectively suspends his eschatology. A man’s Plandemic beliefs do not require him to do anything. He will not storm Pfizer headquarters. His October 7 conspiracy beliefs do not require him to change his work as an insurance agent. The beliefs are inert in the behavioral sense Mercier describes. His open vigilance does not engage them the way it engages threats to his family, because the costs of being wrong are social and coalitional rather than operational.
Mercier’s Edgar Welch case is the comparison. Welch believed the Pizzagate rumor intuitively, which is why he drove to the restaurant armed. The millions who endorsed the rumor on polls believed it reflectively, which is why they did nothing.
The coalitional function is the second layer. Conspiracy beliefs about the Plandemic and October 7 are not free-floating errors. They are signals of membership in specific coalitions. The Plandemic belief signals alignment with a coalition skeptical of public health institutions, government authority, and mainstream media. The October 7 conspiracy beliefs, depending on their content, signal alignment with coalitions invested in particular framings of the Israel-Hamas conflict that mainstream accounts resist. Holding these beliefs and voicing them in the right company is coalition maintenance. Abandoning them would cost him membership in communities whose approval and trust he values.
John M. Doris adds the situational layer. In certain situations, voicing these conspiracy theories raises alarm and in other situations, it does not.
The conventional view expects cognitive consistency across domains. The evidence shows domain-specific competence calibrated to where feedback is fast and coalition-specific belief calibrated to where coalition membership matters.
This pattern is common in community life, not rare. Successful businesspeople who hold conspiracy beliefs, competent physicians who hold fringe religious commitments, careful lawyers who hold political views their own legal training should complicate. The pattern puzzles only the observer who expects the brain to run one coherent belief system. Mercier and Doris together describe a brain that runs several, each calibrated to the coalition and situation it serves. The integration the folk view expects does not exist because the cognitive and social architecture was never built to produce it.